“If you start paying football-style salaries, then it isn’t long, I suppose, before you get football-style behaviour. If you start hyping cricket tournaments with the hoopla of a Las Vegas world heavyweight title match, then soon you get the same pre-bout posturing and verbal pyrotechnics… All that’s missing from cricket these days is a weigh-in and pre-fight photo-call.”

“The BCCI is a destructive body determined to kill cricket… The present lot must be removed before they inflict further damage. Meanwhile, all cricket lovers must hope the IPL is a complete and total flop. And the people who conjured up this dreadful scheme are badly burned.”

As I have said earlier, there is no problem with cricket making all this money. But the government support afforded to cricket at the cost of otehr sports and games is unacceptable. When the badminton federation can’t practice because it can’t import shuttles duty free while Sachin T. can import a Ferrari without paying customs duty, we know that the priorities are cockeyed. Let sports make all the money they can. No lacrosse player in the US complains about NFL/MLB/NBA/NHL stars making all the money. Darn, even the Womens NBA whose entire payroll is less than LeBron James’s contract doesn’t complain. Because they probably realise that it is a purely market driven phenomemnon. In India it is not. And since we are making all this noise about encouraging sports etc., how about getting the government out of cricket and declaring the BCCI an illegal monopoly?

Nick Bryant is some what correct. But cricket over the years was never clean as we have perceived it to be.

But let me make it clear that IPL or ICL are going to make cricket more professional and makes cricket as a carrier option if one happens to be have real talent.

I don’t know why Mr. Vinod Mehta say such a thing. Reasons are not given !

Yes BCCI is a body which out there to make money no doubt but who don’t?

Even Vinod Mehat also put Metro sex survey etc nonsense in his weekly when sales of the same goes down ! Don’t he?

100 chuhe khake billi haj ko chali !

R we jealous of those cricketers who are making such a money? If answer is yes then we are the one who made it possible ! The people like Vinod Mehta and TOI are the people who put cricket on the front page instead of Sports page. When Match fixing controvercy happened this OUTLOOK was the fore front magazine which published all sort of things and bought cricket from backpagers to front page.

Why Vinod Mehta wants the “present lot” removed before they inflict further damage is easily explained.

Sharad Pawar was behind the agitation that saw Mehta resigning as editor of The Independent. The paper started by The Times of India group carried a story that a book by Seymour Hersh had alleged that Y.B. Chavan had been a spy in the Morarji cabinet, and all hell broke loose. Pawar, who sees himself as a protege of Chavan, got the great Marathas to march to the TOI building at Victoria Terminus and threaten to set it on fire. The Jains, always the doyens of free press, gave in.

The Mehta-Pawar animosity extended to Outlook too when Pawar sued the magazine for Rs 100 crore, this time for alleging that he had links with the underworld. After a few years of legal wrangling, a “clarification” appeared in the magazine that the magazine meant no harm to Pawar’s reputation, but the seeds of a long hatred had been sown. The IPL sweepstakes comes in handy to dust up an old rivalry.

imagine combining ICL and IPL into one league but have compete against each other in respective division and from each ICL and IPL teams plays one another. This would be like in NFL in america, where AFL vs NFC, back then they used to be two different league and then they both formed into one in recent years. And it has been huge success in America. I hope something good happens to cricket in india. there is huge potential for 20/20 in india. This could be bigger than SUPER BOWL we have in america.